• Students complete 12 hours (or three courses) per semester while in coursework.
• All students are required to enroll in ENGL 8110 (Proseminar) during their first term and in ENGL 8120 (Pedagogy Seminar) in the spring term of their third year.
• Students may take up to three courses outside of the English Department. Further outside coursework is allowed with Graduate Studies Committee approval.
• Students are required to pass a foreign language translation exam before sitting for the Written Comprehensive Examination at the end of their fifth semester. Tests are offered in September and January of each year.
• Students take their comprehensive examinations in their third year. They consist of a written exam, a dissertation prospectus, and an oral exam. Approval of the final dissertation proposal marks entrance to doctoral candidacy.
• All fourth year students are required to participate in Project Publish.
• Students are expected to earn a minimum grade of B in all courses.
• Students are required to complete RCRG 6308 - Responsible Conduct of Research in the Humanities during their first year of coursework. This requirement will be fulfilled through the required ENGL 8110 Proseminar.

The English Department expects a dissertation to demonstrate breadth of familiarity with the scholarship in the field; a well-defined and sharply focused approach to a problem in that field; a high level of effectiveness in scholarly discussion; and clear potential for the candidate’s independent research in the field after graduate school. The Department considers the dissertation to be a book-length thesis (200-300 pages) of original, independent scholarship that seeks to make a key contribution to the life of the scholarly community in our fields and in the world. The Department does not accept dissertations in Creative Writing.

The Dissertation Committee: The Graduate School requires each student to form a Dissertation Committee. For most students, the dissertation committee is the same as the committee they use for their exams (dissertation chair, two additional ENGL faculty, and an outside reader).

The Dissertation Defense: Students are required to sit for an in-person defense of their dissertation during the late spring term or early summer term of their fifth year. The in-person requirement will be waived by the Graduate Studies Committee only if attendance would create significant hardship for the student. The Department will not usually schedule a dissertation defense with less than a month notice.

Doctoral Students and Faculty Handbook

This is the typical Six-Year Schedule for most students. View a printable version HERE.

Year One

Fall Semester

• Enroll in 12 hours of coursework (3 courses), including ENGL 8110 Proseminar

Spring Semester

• Enroll in 12 hours of coursework (3 courses)
• Mid-May: M.A. Thesis Registration Form due

Summer

• Mid-August: Preliminary M.A. Thesis due
• Attend longer summer institutes, such as IWL or SCT

Year Two

Fall Semester

• Enroll in 12 hours of coursework (3 courses)
• September/October: Participation in 2nd Year Conference
• Early November: Final M.A. Thesis due
• End of October: Submit all M.A. paperwork for December graduation to DGS office

Spring Semester

• Enroll in 12 hours of coursework (3 courses)
• Mid-May: Preliminary Comprehensive Reading Lists due

Summer

• Read for Exams
• Attend a shorter summer institute

Year Three

Fall Semester

• Enroll in 4 hours of coursework (ENGL 8120 Pedagogy Seminar) and 5 hours of ENGL 8999 (non-candidate research) with the DGS
• September: Comps/Ph.D. Committee Appointment Forms due to DGS
• Mid-October: First Tiered Comprehensive Exam Reading Lists due to committee

Spring Semester

• Enroll in 3 hours of ENGL 8999 (non-candidate research) with the DGS and 2 hours of ENGL 8121 (Pedagogy Seminar) 
• Teach one undergraduate course as Instructor of Record
• End of January: Final Tiered Comprehensive Exam Reading Lists due to committees and DGS
• Spring Break: Written Comprehensive Exams
• Mid-April: Preliminary Dissertation Prospectus due to committees and DGS.

Summer

• May: Complete Oral Exams. Begin the dissertation phase; attend shorter summer institute if desired.
• Mid-June: Final Dissertation Proposal and approval form due to committees and DGS office.

Year Four

Fall Semester

• Enroll in 5 hours of ENGL 9999 (dissertation research) with dissertation chair
• Beginning of September: Preliminary First Chapter Draft due to committees
• Teach Second Undergraduate Course as Instructor of Record
• Mid-December: Final version of First Chapter due to committees and DGS (deadline for Myers First Chapter Awards)

Spring Semester

• Enroll in 3 hours of ENGL 9999 (dissertation research) with dissertation chair and 2 hours of ENGL 8112 (Project Publish) 
• Teach Third Undergraduate Course as Instructor of Record
• End of April: Second dissertation chapter due

Summer

• Continue to work on dissertation
• Attend shorter summer institutes if doing so is useful for the dissertation.
• End of August: Third dissertation chapter due

Year Five

Fall Semester

• Enroll in 0 hours of ENGL 9999 (dissertation research) with dissertation chair
• Instructor of Record teaching option (one course)
• Mid-December: Fourth dissertation chapter due

Spring Semester

• Enroll in 0 hours of ENGL 9999 (dissertation research) with dissertation chair
• Revise dissertation chapters and write introduction
• June 1: Draft of complete dissertation due to committees and DGS office
• Attend all meetings of the Job Placement Committee in preparation for entering the job market in the fall.

Summer

• Start revising full dissertation draft and work on materials for jobs and post-doctoral fellowships.
• Please note: While your stipend is guaranteed, any student who fails to meet these conditions will be ineligible for supplementary departmental funding (such as the Myers Travel Grant) in year six.  

Year Six

Fall Semester

• Enroll in 0 hours of ENGL 9999 (dissertation research) with dissertation chair 
• Revise the dissertation for submission and to turn it either into articles or a book manuscript.
• Teach fourth undergraduate course as Instructor of Record
• Conduct a full-scale job search with the assistance of your committee and the Job Placement officers.

Spring Semester

• Enroll in 0 hours of ENGL 9999 (dissertation research) with dissertation chair 
• Continue with dissertation revisions as needed and focus on turning it either into articles or a book manuscript.
• Teach fifth undergraduate course as Instructor of Record (optional)
• May/June: Defend dissertation (check deadlines for Intent to Graduate and other needed forms) and submit all materials for graduation by mid-July (check exact deadline).

*For students admitted prior to 2023, you can reference your old timeline here while you transition to the 6-year timeline: Doctoral Program Timeline Overview

ENGL 8112.01: Project Publish

Jay Clayton

R 1:15 - 4:15 PM 

Project Publish is 2-credit graduate seminar designed to help each student produce an academic article ready to submit for publication by the end of the semester. The course will combine analysis of exemplary critical articles, practical advice about the mechanics of publishing, and writing workshop sessions in which we read one another’s drafts. You should come to the first meeting having identified one of your best papers from a previous seminar to spend the semester revising for publication, and you should expect to produce multiple drafts over the course of the term. [4]

ENGL 8138.01: Seminar in Critical Theory: Literature and Philosophy

Jessie Hock

W 10:30 - 1:30 PM 

In What is Philosophy? (1991), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari distinguish between philosophy, art, and science. These three disciplines do different things: philosophy creates concepts, the arts create percepts (i.e. sensual perceptions), and science creates functions (that is, predicts the behavior of systems). This class examines the relation between the literary arts and philosophy, with a focus on questions such as: how has the relation between literature and philosophy been articulated differently at different moments in the western literary tradition? What are the theoretical overlaps and methodological differences between literature and philosophy, and how do our methods for reading literary and philosophical texts differ or overlap? How can we bring literature to bear on philosophy, and vice versa, and is it possible to think their relation with greater complexity than a simple back and forth?

Obviously, “philosophy and literature” is an enormous topic, and the course will be tailored to the interests of its students in terms of genres, philosophical schools, and historical periods. Selected authors might include (in no particular order): Plato, Lucretius, Alain de Lille, William Wordsworth, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Anne Carson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Luce Irigaray, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Lydia Davis. [4]  

ENGL 8138.02: Seminar in Critical Theory: Modernity and the Question of Political Theology

Alex Dubilet

T 4:15 - 7:15 PM 

Through an engagement with classical and contemporary texts in critical theory, this class explores a set of interlocking questions about theological presuppositions underwriting political modernity and the ongoing planetary catastrophe. It traces how theological conceptions, grammars, and operations have surprising afterlives and continue to structure putatively secular realities such as sovereignty, subjection, law, history, and violence, as well more insurgent imaginaries. Engaging the lively interdisciplinary field of political theology, this class explores the conceptual and narrative (dis)continuities that bind histories of monotheism to modernity. In the process, it also introduces students to critical perspectives on the status of secularity and secularism. Authors may include Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jacob Taubes, Sylvia Wynter, Tomoko Masuzawa, Gil Anidjar, Saba Mahmood, Jan Assmann, and Giorgio Agamben. [4]  

ENGL 8410.01: Studies in Romantic and Victorian Literature: Science and Science Fiction in the Nineteenth Century

Mezzanine with ENGL 3898.02 (Honors Seminar)

Jay Clayton

M 12:20 - 3:20 PM 

Twice during the nineteenth century, scientific discoveries galvanized creative changes in the novel, giving rise to the genre we call science fiction. Everyone knows about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), often regarded as the first true SF novel. But were you aware of how voyages of discovery by Darwin and others sparked revolutionary speculative fictions like Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)? At the other end of the century, a plethora of utopian tales, science fiction novels, horror stories, and imperial romances thrilled readers with their controversial speculations. These fictional works were often more influential than the scientific discoveries that they referenced, fueling some of the most disturbing social movements of the fin de siècle: so-called “racial science,” eugenics, and imperialism.

The first part of the course will juxtapose two novels published in the same year, Frankenstein and Jane Austen’s Persuasion, to highlight the major differences between SF and realist fiction. After reading Darwin and Poe, we will fast-forward to the second half of the century to sample science fiction and horror stories such as Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); and an imperial romance, H. Ryder Haggard’s She (1887), as well as Pauline Hopkins’s African American inversion of colonial romance, Of One Blood (1903). We will conclude with Octavia Butler’s harrowing Neo-Victorian novel, Kindred (1979), and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad (2016). [4]  

ENGL 8138.01: Seminar in Critical Theory: Dispossession, the Environment, and Capitalism's Endgame 

Ben Tran 

R 12:30 - 3:30 PM 

This graduate seminar examines how literary works address the territorialization and enclosure of land, sea, and atmosphere. How do literary works convey, manifest, and critique the interconnections between 1) a history of ideas enacted through imperial and state forces; 2) the violence of racial capitalism; and 3) the destruction of the environment. Our three primary literary texts will be: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, Mai Der Vang’s Yellow Rain, and Siddhartha Deb’s Light at the End of the World.

After reading these works and considering various historical contexts, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks, we will interrogate the possible endgames of capitalism’s dispossession. Has capitalism yielded something worse, if not ended? Why has the atmosphere eluded thorough theorization and territorialization, yet it is now, more than ever, an imperative medium and resource of dispossession, from chemical warfare and drones to air pollution and wireless networking technology (such as 5G) extracting the data of our personal lives? How have global geopolitics and empires been reconfigured, such as the rising tension between China and the US as a potential new Cold War or competing infrastructure and economic systems?

Our readings and discussion will consider how scholars have approached this development in the humanities and social sciences. By engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship across literary studies, critical theory, black studies, history, environmental humanities, and settler colonial and postcolonial studies, this seminar will introduce students to some of the most significant concepts of modern theoretical discourse, useful for research across different time periods, genres, and subdisciplines. [4]  

ENGL 8351.01: Studies in 20th and 21st Century American Literatures: Aesthetics and Politics (Honors Seminar)

Mezzanine with ENGL 3898.03

Candice Amich

TR 11:00 - 12:15 PM 

What happens when the line between art and life becomes blurred? When bodies in the street become aestheticized or poems become acts of political protest? In this course we will study the relationship between poetics, politics, and performance across the 20/21 century Americas. We’ll begin with a survey of foundational debates in Marxist criticism in literature and art, which later theoretical readings will build upon. Aesthetic-political touchstones will include Black Surrealism, Conceptualism in Latin American Art, Brechtian theater, postcolonial poetics, and the performance of witness. [4]  

ENGL 8440.01 Studies in Comparative Literature: Literature in Dark Times 

Allison Schachter 

TH 12:00 – 3:00 PM   

What does it mean to create literature in dark times? How do we know when we are living in such times? What does living mean and for whom? These are pressing concerns for our own historical moment. In this class we will examine how writers register the rise of authoritarian regimes, the varieties of state violence, and the breakdown of everyday life that ensues. We will read theoretical works written during and in the aftermath of the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in the twentieth century by writers such as Hannah Arendt, Lorraine Hansberry, Zora Neale Husrton, and Svetlana Alexievich. We’ll consider experimental attempts to document state violence and its effects on everyday life. We’ll also read twenty-first century works navigate the complex boundaries between aesthetics and politics; representation and documentation; and realism and experimental form. Much of the writing about midcentury state violence has focused on male intellectuals and writers, so for the purpose of this class we’ll give special attention to women writers and intellectuals to consider the ways that they approached these historical and aesthetic concerns.  

ENGL 8138.01 Seminar in Critical Theory and Methodology: Postcolonial Methods 

Akshya Saxena 

T 2:45 – 5:45 PM  

This course introduces the broad field and methodologies of postcolonial studies. It asks: What is the relationship between anti-colonialism, decolonialization, and postcolonialism? How have these theoretical and political positions shaped contemporary academic debates about postcoloniality? 

While postcolonial studies is not a unified field of theoretical inquiry, we begin by tracing key moments, thinkers, and texts in its academic disciplinarization. We examine the emergence, institutionalization, and enduring “crisis” of postcolonial studies today. Along the way, we develop frameworks to think broadly about the cultural production in the Global South by those subjects whose identities and histories have been shaped by colonial encounters. How might we stage a conversation between postcolonial studies (historically focused on modern colonization in South Asia and Africa) with American, Hemispheric, and Ethnic Studies? Centering “method” as a question, we will explore the overlaps and disjunctures between postcolonial theory, globalization studies, and theories from the margins that draw on the Black radical tradition, Marxist critiques of imperialism, and indigenous critiques of settler colonialism. 

The course consists of three units: 1) Mapping the field—key thinkers (January) 2) Postcolonial vs Decolonial, settler colonialism/Indigenous studies (February) 3) a series of guest lectures by faculty members (mid-March-mid-April). The last two weeks focus on developing your final research paper. 

ENGL 8370.01: Studies in Eighteenth Century British Literature: The Novel and the Philosophy of History: From the Polis to the Planetary

Scott Juengel 

M 3:00 – 6:00 PM  

The novel is frequently cast as the quintessential bourgeois form, complicit with liberal norms, capitalist striving, and imperial planning.  That story is certainly familiar and true, but this seminar opens the conceptual aperture wider to consider how the novel participates in modern ideas about historical time and historical consciousness.  To what degree is the novel hero a historical subject, and how does the ‘prose of the world’ advance a sense of history’s emplotment?  In a contemporary moment when certain reactionary forces are attempting to ban our histories, and discount our futures, why is historical fiction flourishing?  To be clear, this is not a course on historicism as a method, or the historical novel as a genre; instead, it focuses on literary works that function as meditations on historical time (e.g. deep time, conjectural history, insurgent futurities, catastrophe, genealogical archives, collective memory, etc.).  The seminar will be anchored by 6-8 works of fiction stretching from Defoe to our contemporary moment, but our week-to-week deliberations will be quickened by short readings in narrative/novel theory, and modern philosophy of history from Vico to Arendt and beyond. 

ENGL 8110 Proseminar

Jen Fay

MW 10:00-11:15am

The proseminar provides an introduction to graduate studies through attention to practical, structural, and theoretical issues.  We will consider various accounts of the university as an institution, with emphases that range from its status as a corporate entity, to its disparate investments in futurity, to its history as a locus of dissent.  We will look closely at specific aspects of professionalization, drawing on the experience of invited guests to discuss such processes as the development of research questions, methodologies, and archives; preparation for comprehensive examinations; steps that lead to a dissertation project; and the stages through which an essay moves toward publication.  We will also expand our inquiries outward, to consider paradigms with implications not only for how we practice our academic work, but for how we inhabit the social world: ideology and cultural capital, discipline and precarity, community and consent.  As we move through the semester, students will have opportunities to assign texts – fictional, historical, critical, and/or theoretical – that represent the periods, forms, and approaches with which they are most concerned. (This course fulfills the RCRG 6308 requirement). [4]

ENGL 8120 Pedagogy

Candice Amich

TR 11:00am-12:15pm

This is a learning-intensive workshop where you will plan your spring 2024 1000-level “W” class.  We will emphasize a learning-centered, student-oriented approach to teaching, and a revision-based approach to writing instruction.  You will learn how to plan your class holistically, to backward design from clearly defined learning goals.  You will design assignments from assessment models that connect organically and transparently to your learning goals for the class.  You will get ideas for interacting with and managing classroom affect to produce better learning for your students.  You will learn, in tandem with your observation of another course, to design and run fruitful class discussions with your student’s learning outcomes in mind.  You will learn to evaluate and comment productively on student papers.  You will finish with a fully designed class, with plans for each day, with discussion plans, forward and backward quizzes, writing and recall exercises, and other classroom activities. [4]

ENGL 8351 Studies in 20th and 21st Century American Literatures: Black Worlds and World-Making

Anthony Reed / Brandon Byrd

M 12:20-3:20pm

This seminar is about Black people and the modern world. With canonical and contemporary readings, it attends to historical and contemporary thought and the subjective experiences of people who have claimed Blackness as a political, social, and cultural identity. By working across disciplinary and activist modes of scholarship both recent and foundational, this seminar will establish a common ground and a foundation on which students and scholars from a variety of backgrounds can collaborate for the mutual purposes of study and struggle. On certain weeks, we will join our class meeting with the Black Worlds Seminar at the Robert Penn Warren Center. This Seminar invites scholars from Vanderbilt and beyond to share new and in-progress research on topics such as interrelated struggles for racial justice, practices of resistance, and dreams of freedom across Africa and its Diaspora. [4]

ENGL 8410 Studies in Romantic and Victorian Literatures: British Literature and the Afterlives of Race

Rachel Teukolsky

W 12:00-3:00pm

How did notions of race, embodiment, and human difference inflect nineteenth-century British literatures? The course begins with the truism that the British empire established contact zones in India, Africa, and the Caribbean islands (among others) where the quest for profit on foreign lands contributed to racist hierarchies of self and other. Yet British aesthetic embodiments were complicated and at times unpredictable. We’ll pursue the question with an open-ended, multiform approach. One crucial focus will be the cultural and literary effects of the diaspora of African peoples around the world during an era of mass enslavement. The course will explore not only works of 19th-century British literature but also contemporary rewritings and adaptations, especially those by writers of color. Classic nineteenth-century texts have been an extraordinary crucible for twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, who have used them to meditate on the founding conditions of racial modernity.

Potential pairings will include: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) with Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); Dion Boucicault’s stage melodrama The Octoroon (1859) with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s stage rewriting, An Octoroon (2014); JMW Turner’s notorious painting of a slave ship (1840) with David Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” (1995); documents surrounding “the Hottentot Venus” alongside Suzan Lori-Parks’s contemporary stage play Venus (1996); and a sequence beginning with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898), followed by Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1958), Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979), and the recent documentary film African Apocalypse (2020). Other readings may include Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, “Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”; essays on slavery by Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill; and Mary Seacole’s The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), a Jamaican woman’s war memoir. We’ll also study a selection of theory, from the nineteenth century to the present. The course welcomes both novices and experts.

ENGL 8138 Critical Theory & Methodology

Alex Dubilet

Tuesday 2:45pm - 5:45pm

This class investigates the interrelation of three nodes in contemporary theoretical discourse: civil war and its genealogies as explored in critical and political theory (e.g. Foucault, Tiqqun, Agamben), theories of antagonism and general antagonism as articulated in contemporary Black studies (Wilderson, Harney & Moten), and the imaginary of insurgency and counter-insurgency in colonial modernity. It will pursue such questions as: What is the role of civil war and antagonism in our theorizations of modernity? How are genealogies of civil war as a counterweight to sovereignty and the state transformed if we understand political modernity centrally through the prism of coloniality and the (after)lives of slavery? What is the relation between theorizations of permanent civil war constituting society (e.g. Marx) and general antagonism as “a constant and ongoing rebellion and insurgency against identity” that emerges out of the Black radical tradition? The course will touch upon questions of destituent power, the undercommons, sovereignty and the unsovereign, insurrection and justification, as well as the figures of the partisan, the insurgent, and the terrorist. Other authors read may include Arendt, Bargu, Benjamin, Clastres, Deleuze, Devji, Esposito, Fanon, Gago, Gordon, Hartman, Loraux, Losurdo, Nietzsche, Mao, Marx, Mufti, Owens, Robinson, Schmitt, Tomba, Tronti, Vardoulakis. [4]

ENGL 8351 20th and 21st Century American Literature: Exploring the Environmental Humanities

Carlos Nugent

Thursday 2:45pm - 5:45pm

Climate scientists have come to a consensus that the planet has passed into the Anthropocene—a geological epoch in which human societies have a dominant and even determining influence on their nonhuman environments. As these scientists have analyzed the Anthropocene’s material traces, humanists have started studying its cultural causes and consequences. Drawing on and developing such efforts, this course invites Ph.D. students, M.A. students, and advanced undergraduates to explore the “environmental humanities.” Most abstractly, the course meditates on its own conditions of (im)possibility: how, it asks, have environmental problems (from local pollution to global warming) become (un)intelligible to academic disciplines (especially ecocriticism, or environmental literary criticism). More concretely, the course attends to our collective pasts and futures: how, it asks yet more insistently, have our more-than-human realities (from plants and animals to chemicals and machines) shaped and been shaped by our all-too-human identities (such as gender, race, and class)?   [4]

ENGL 8440 Studies in Comparative Literatures: Caribbean Singularities

Vera Kutzinski

Wednesday 12:20pm - 3:20pm

What makes the Caribbean, which some have described as an “American Mediterranean,” so singular? One answer might be creolization (Glissant), another might be place (Harris), a third one might be revolution (James). Starting with these and other answers, we will explore examples of geocultural thinking about the Caribbean and its history in a range of literary and critical works from the second half of the twentieth century. This Caribbean is of course an extended Caribbean— the Caribbean archipelago, its rimlands, its diaspora. Our focus will be on the lived and (dis)remembered/imagined experiences tied to this world of interconnected islands, going all the way back to the Middle Passage and the Plantation. How has the specificity of the Caribbean land with its histories of (neo-/post-) colonialization across different colonial languages shaped how writers represent ways of being (including racial and sexual identities), disrupt literary aesthetics and engage with cultural politics? To get a precise sense of what it means to write not just about a place but also in a specific place at a particular time, we will anchor our conversations in  selections from the work of four key twentieth-century figures: Wilson Harris (Guyana), Edouard Glissant (Martinique), Antonio Benítez Rojo (Cuba), and C.L.R. James (Trinidad). Their writings are fulcrums for a host of earlier and later texts; we will read some of those (most likely the novels; more on this later) and not others. I will map these relations for you for future reading. [4]

Courses of Interest in other Departments

GSS 8304 Gender, Power, and Justice

Kathryn Schwarz

Wednesday 1pm - 3:30pm

What is the relationship between theory and practice? It’s an old question; still, as I write a course description amidst our current cultural dynamics, it strikes me with new force. We invest much energy to create theoretical paradigms for social experiences: theories of gendered, racial, economic, and sexual inequities; of discipline and ideology; of separatism, coalition, and community; of vulnerability, interdependence, oppression, and resistance. At what points do theory and practice meet to produce effective action, and to facilitate the pursuit of social justice?

As we consider the complicated nexus of gender, justice, and power, we’ll engage thinkers who interweave the conceptual with the experiential: feminists of color; queer activists; radical separatists; advocates for interrelation and coalition; creators of manifestoes and polemics. I’ll set some of these texts, but our archive will be a collaborative project. Each of you will have opportunities to share resources, drawn from your own disciplines, from contemporary popular discourses, and from other contexts that add depth and vitality to our conversations. We’ll work together to bring individual insights and experiences into conversation with one another. And we’ll approach theories of social justice not only on their terms but also on our own, with a degree of enthusiasm, a measure of skepticism, and at least a flicker of hope. 

AMER 8000 The Rhetoric of Inquiry in American Studies

Paul Stob

Wednesday 3:10pm - 6pm

American Studies is an interdisciplinary field that links scholars from such disciplines as history, English, philosophy, sociology, religious studies, communication studies, and more. This course will explore the past, present, and future of American Studies through the language, symbols, and discourse that shape its interdisciplinary inquiry. Beginning with a brief history of the field, the course will feature the scholarship of (and discussions led by) Vanderbilt faculty from across the university. In addition, the course follows a workshop model, which will offer students the chance to work on their own projects (including those begun in their home departments) in the context of peer-led, interdisciplinary writing groups. [4]

ENGL 8110 Proseminar

Kathryn Schwarz

Tuesday 2:45 - 5:45 PM

The proseminar provides an introduction to graduate studies through attention to practical, structural, and theoretical issues.  We will consider various accounts of the university as an institution, with emphases that range from its status as a corporate entity, to its disparate investments in futurity, to its history as a locus of dissent.  We will look closely at specific aspects of professionalization, drawing on the experience of invited guests to discuss such processes as the development of research questions, methodologies, and archives; preparation for comprehensive examinations; steps that lead to a dissertation project; and the stages through which an essay moves toward publication.  We will also expand our inquiries outward, to consider paradigms with implications not only for how we practice our academic work, but for how we inhabit the social world: ideology and cultural capital, discipline and precarity, community and consent.  As we move through the semester, students will have opportunities to assign texts – fictional, historical, critical, and/or theoretical – that represent the periods, forms, and approaches with which they are most concerned. (This course fulfills the RCRG 6308 requirement). [4]

ENGL 8120 Pedagogy

Vera Kutzinski

Tuesday & Thursday, 10:00 - 11:15 AM

This is a learning-intensive workshop where you will plan your fall 2020 1000-level “W” class.  We will emphasize a learning-centered, student-oriented approach to teaching, and a revision-based approach to writing instruction.  You will learn how to plan your class holistically, to backward design from clearly defined learning goals.  You will design assignments from assessment models that connect organically and transparently to your learning goals for the class.  You will get ideas for interacting with and managing classroom affect to produce better learning for your students.  You will learn, in tandem with your observation of another course, to design and run fruitful class discussions with your student’s learning outcomes in mind.  You will learn to evaluate and comment productively on student papers.  You will finish with a fully designed class, with plans for each day, with discussion plans, forward and backward quizzes, writing and recall exercises, and other classroom activities. [4]

ENGL 8331 Studies in Medieval and Early-Modern British Literature: What is Lyric

Jessie Hock

Thursday 3:35 - 6:35 PM

This seminar will do three things: first, it explores contemporary theorizations of lyric poetry by scholars of several different fields and historical periods. Second, it offers an in-depth introduction to English lyric poetry from the mid-sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth century. While the course is not a survey (Spenser, for example, gets short shrift), we will cover many of the important lyric genres and poetic movements of the period, including Petrarchism, metaphysical poetry, cavalier poetry, pastoral, devotional lyric, and more. Finally, the seminar aims to support students’ development not just as readers and critics of Renaissance poetry, or even lyric poetry in general, but as teachers of poetry. It will thus function as a practicum of sorts in reading, analyzing, teaching, and writing about verse. Throughout the course, we will look both backwards and forwards in time, attending on the one hand to the classical forbearers of Renaissance lyric, and on the other to the payoffs those lyrics have today, in terms of influence but also in terms of theories of lyric. In the last weeks of class our focus on the latter will take us beyond the Renaissance to later poets, almost certainly Emily Dickinson, a poet who has come to be vital to contemporary theorizations of lyric, and perhaps others according to class interest. [4]

ENGL 8351 Studies in 20th and 21st Century American Literatures: Diaspora, Poetics, Empire

Anthony Reed

Monday 12:20 - 3:20 PM

Despite but also powerfully shaped by the imposition of race as a pre-organizing grid through which the dominant culture frames Black being, Black political organization depends on formulating forms of solidarity, however contingent. Forms of solidarity—social, political, ethical, and aesthetic—are this course’s topic. We start from the understanding that conflicts within and between movements and actors inflect theories of “consciousness,” “subjectivity,” “identity,” “social construction,” or “ontological predicament” of the past half century. How have those working alongside the sign-complex of the “Negro,” “Colored,” Black,” “African American,” etc., imagined and enacted collectivity and freedom? How does this imagining register in and as literary form?

The transition from colonial and related modalities of direct domination to contemporary forms of more indirect domination has an aesthetic corollary in what is represented, how literary texts capture and negotiate the dynamic nature of the discourses, laws, and conventions that reproduce racial difference, and how those texts imagine community and freedom. In this seminar, we will read a range of theoretical and literary texts (without treating those terms as opposing or mutually exclusive) to interrogate matters of representation and poetics. Poetics does not refer to poetry alone, but to the genre- and form-specific ways texts produce the effects that mark them as literary within and against the grain of the power relations that shape the literary. This means we will also attend to the relationship between official narratives of history and the representations of discrete practices of time-keeping that shape the relationship between sites of the African diaspora. Focusing on key 20th century and contemporary texts and debates, this course will track Black responses to empire, its dissolution, and the limits of sovereignty alongside shifting understandings of race and solidarity. Abiding questions include the relationship of literature to its context, alongside time as theme and formal concern—e.g., progress, stasis, and recursion—in literary and theoretical texts. [4]

ENGL 8351 Studies in 20th and 21st Century American Literatures: Narratives of Black Love and Kinship

Emily Lordi

Wednesday 12:20 - 3:20 PM

This course will examine well known works of African American fiction, nonfiction, and theory that thematize Black love, desire, intimacy, and the intricacies of domestic life. Reading across the shifting literary, legal, social, and critical terrains of the 20th and 21st centuries, we will ask how and to what extent the legacies of enslavement continue to shape and inspire Black kinship. How are the dynamics of patriarchy and anti-Black racism reproduced and resisted in Black domestic spaces? How do certain genres (e.g., passing narratives) speak to the imbrications of Blackness and whiteness, and how might marriage plots—what critic Ann du Cille called “the coupling convention”—signify hope as well as anxiety regarding female mobility, Black diasporic alliance, queer desire, and reproductive futurity? Grading is based on respectful participation, regular attendance, one presentation, and a final paper. [4] 

ENGL 8441 Studies in Anglophone World Literatures: Literature Across Media

Akshya Saxena

Thursday 12:20 - 3:20 PM

We seldom think of literature as a hybrid medium. However, the proliferation of digital technologies has intensified the interrelation of media everywhere. This course focuses on how contemporary global Anglophone literature invokes and interacts with film, sound, performance, digital, and the visual arts. Building upon interventions in sound studies, film and visual media, and reading practices, it explores the interplay of the textual, aural, and figural in contemporary global Anglophone literature.

The term Anglo-“phone” invokes both the people who speak and the technology that makes them heard. As literary scholars, we are used to asking “who speaks” but rarely “who listens?” and “how?” How does literature not simply represent the sounds of non-Anglophone worlds but emerge in the space between sound and silence, orality and writing?  What materialities, surfaces, and soundscapes does literature occupy most urgently, and to what end? With a mix of literary and critical readings, this course introduces contemporary global Anglophone literature, and imagines a critical reading practice that is attentive to their trans-medial and post-lingual character. [4]

ENGL 8442 Media Studies: Cinema and the Problem of Work

Jennifer Fay & Iggy Cortez

Monday 3:35 - 6:35 PM

How do the rhythms, cadences, and bodily affects of work lend themselves to cinematic figuration? What difference does cinema make to the form and aestheticization of labor? How does the medium register shifts from industrial to post-industrial culture and from Fordist regimentation to the neoliberal gig economy?  

This seminar considers work in relation to theories of the subject as made manifest on film and in dialogue with affect theory, critical race studies, performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, and unfolding debates on the distinction between nonwork and leisure, 24/7 capitalism, and data surveillance. Attentive to how work has historically buttressed notions of belonging and futurity, we will interrogate how labor—and its potential alternatives—shape evolving configurations of intimacy, identification, and desire. It will also consider cinema as a commodity and therefore, itself, as a product of labor. [4]

ENGL 8110 Proseminar

Candice Amich

Thursday 12:00  – 3:00 PM

The proseminar provides an introduction to English graduate studies through attention to both practical and theoretical issues. We will preview the arc of progress through the PhD program, from the art of the seminar paper to developing a dissertation project. Special attention will be paid to developing the writing skills necessary for professional success; we will draft and exchange conference abstracts, conference papers, and book reviews. We will also examine the stages through which an essay, that begins as a conference or seminar paper, may move toward publication. Together we will read a host of theoretical and critical essays that cover established and emerging approaches across historical periods, geographic areas, and genres. [4]

ENGL 8120 Pedagogy

Dana Nelson 

TR 10:00 - 11:15 AM

This is a learning-intensive workshop where you will plan your fall 2020 1000-level “W” class.  We will emphasize a learning-centered, student-oriented approach to teaching, and a revision-based approach to writing instruction.  You will learn how to plan your class holistically, to backward design from clearly defined learning goals.  You will design assignments from assessment models that connect organically and transparently to your learning goals for the class.  You will get ideas for interacting with and managing classroom affect to produce better learning for your students.  You will learn, in tandem with your observation of another course, to design and run fruitful class discussions with your student’s learning outcomes in mind.  You will learn to evaluate and comment productively on student papers.  You will finish with a fully designed class, with plans for each day, with discussion plans, forward and backward quizzes, writing and recall exercises, and other classroom activities. [4]

ENGL 8138 Critical Theory: Psychoanalysis and Materialism: Love Books

Lynn Enterline and Jessie Hock

Thursday 3:10 – 6:00 PM

This team-taught seminar explores questions of critical methodology at the intersection of two theoretical paradigms, psychoanalysis and materialism. Some would consider pairing psychoanalysis and materialism perverse: contemporary turns to materialism (the “new materialisms”) are generally understood as a reaction against deconstructive theory’s emphasis on language, but psychoanalytic thought (both in Freud and the “French Freud”) puts theories of language at the center of any discussion of what it means to live in a body that speaks. In order to think psychoanalysis and materialism together, this class will return to ancient texts that refuse crude distinctions between psyche, soma, and discourse. Ancient materialism, which has deeply informed every later materialist turn (for example, Marx wrote his dissertation on the ancient atomists) puts poetry at the heart of its enterprise; and ancient semiotics, as well as the French theorists who turned to it, understand discourse to be a material event. Leaning both backward and forward in history, our study and conversation will look at the ways in which classical thinkers such as Lucretius and Ovid anticipate, inspire, and resonate in contemporary theoretical writing. Questions of sex, desire, and gender will be central. Most of the ancients gendered matter feminine to subordinate it (to form, to the idea), but Lucretius’s association of matter with the goddess Venus gives an extraordinarily positive valence to the body, desire, and the feminine. And psychoanalysis, which is opposed to teleological accounts of the sexed body’s biology, nonetheless takes biology into account in order to offer an anti-foundational theory about what it means to inhabit a gendered, sexualized body over time—the experience of which varies from culture to culture. Key theorists will include Althusser, Anzieu, Bersani, Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Freud, Lacan, Laplanche, Lucretius, and Kristeva. Additional sites through which we explore the conjunction between psychoanalysis and materialism will include literary texts by Margaret Cavendish, Andrew Marvell, Ovid, and John Webster. [4]

ENGL 8351 Studies in 20th & 21st Century American Literatures

Vera Kutzinski

Tuesday 12:10 – 3:00 PM

When Frank Dery coined the term “Afro-Futurism” in 1993, he was not especially thinking of women writers—even though Octavia Butler had been publishing her novels and stories since the late 1970s and who was to receive a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. Even a 2007 special issue on Afro-Futurism of the journal Science Fiction Studies included only two of the many Black women SF writers who, following in Butler’s footsteps, have emerged the 1990s to much popular acclaim. Among them are Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, Karen Lord, Jewelle Gomez, and N.K. Jemisin whose fictions we will read in this seminar in connection with selections of Butler’s work. Doing so will give us a precise sense of Butler’s enduring literary legacy across the African diaspora—notably in the Caribbean, West Africa, Canada, and the USA.

I am using the more flexible “SF” in my title to avoid boxing in the above authors by imposing on their work terms such as “science fiction,” “speculative fiction,” “postcolonial fiction,” or “fantasy.” These literary genres or modes intersect in their work to an extent that makes them virtually indistinguishable, which largely obviates their analytical usefulness. I have also avoided the designation “Afro-futurist” because of its masculinist emphasis. Rather, I want to suggest that there are salient differences between the imaginative work that Black SF women writers have been producing and that of their male colleagues. To put some of these differences in perspective, we will read Samuel R. Delany’s Babel 17. We will also address the geo-cultural differences to which Nnedi Okorar alludes in her 2019 coinage of “Africanfuturism” as an alternative to “Afro-Futurism.”

Among the questions we will explore are the following: What are Black women writers’ creative strategies for surviving anti-black racism, along with persistent sexism and gender discrimination? What alternatives to raced and gendered violence, oppression, and exploitation become thinkable in other geo-temporal locations? How have Black women writers imagined the possibilities and the limits of humans living respectfully with so-called others? Who are those others in their fictions? What is the half-life of the institution of slavery? What forms of enslavement continue to surface in the work of Black women writers? How do they imagine the future of humans in relation to the environment? [4]

Provisional list of literary readings:

• Butler, Octavia E., selections from Lilith’s Brood (1987-89): Dawn and Adulthood Rites.
• -----. Fledgling (2005). 
• Delany, Samuel R. Babel 17 (1966)
• Gomez, Jewelle, The Gilda Stories (1991)
• Hopkinson, Nalo, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998)
• Hopkinson, Nalo and Uppinder Mehan, eds. So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004)
• Jemisin, Nora K., selections from The Broken Earth Trilogy (2018)
• Lord, Karen, The Best of All Worlds
• Okorafor, Nnedi, Binti: the Complete Trilogy (2015-17)
• Talabi, Wole, ed., Africanfuturism: An Anthology (2020)

Film:

• Lewis, Sharon, dir., Brown Girl Begins (2018)

ENGL 8441 Studies in Anglophone World Literatures: The Long Poem

Colin Dayan

Tuesday 3:10 - 6:00 PM

The seminar adopts a “workshop” approach: a few students (depending on class size) each week will make available their interventions. These writings will be the basis of our discussion.  

The long poem—or “poetic sequence”—is a hybrid genre, a compound of lyric “immediacy” and epic “inclusiveness.” We will discuss this genre-marriage of the form, as well as ask what happens when history becomes part of poetry, recalling Pound’s idea of the epic as a long poem that “contained history.” Studying the interplay between politics and poetry, racial or racially inflected poetic practice and cultural production, we begin with Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass, then turn to Eliot, Pound, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott, and N. NourbeSe Philip.  

Other readings include: Hart Crane (The Bridge), Wallace Stevens (Auroras of Autumn), Charles Olson (Maximus), and Harryette Mullen (Drudge). [4]

ENGL 8120 Pedagogy

Dana Nelson - Hybrid Attendance

TR 10:00 - 11:15 AM

This is a learning-intensive workshop where you will plan your fall 2020 1000-level “W” class.  We will emphasize a learning-centered, student-oriented approach to teaching, and a revision-based approach to writing instruction.  You will learn how to plan your class holistically, to backward design from clearly defined learning goals.  You will design assignments from assessment models that connect organically and transparently to your learning goals for the class.  You will get ideas for interacting with and managing classroom affect to produce better learning for your students.  You will learn, in tandem with your observation of another course, to design and run fruitful class discussions with your student’s learning outcomes in mind.  You will learn to evaluate and comment productively on student papers.  You will finish with a fully designed class, with plans for each day, with discussion plans, forward and backward quizzes, writing and recall exercises, and other classroom activities. [4]

ENGL 8138 Seminar in Critical Theory and Methodology: Literature in Dark Times

Allison Schachter - Online Synchronous

R 12:10 - 3:00 PM

What does it mean to create literature in dark times? How do we know when we are living in such times? What does living mean and for whom? These are pressing concerns for our own historical moment. In this class we will examine how  writers register the rise of authoritarian regimes, the varieties of  state violence, and the breakdown of everyday life that ensues. We will read theoretical works written during and in the aftermath of the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in the first half of the century, including works by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Svetlana Alexievich. We’ll consider experimental attempts to document state violence and its effects on everyday life in works like Charlotte Beradt’s Third Reich of Dreams and Victor Klemperer’s  Language of the Third Reich. Finally, we’ll read  twentieth and twenty-first century novels and memoirs that aim to represent this violence. We’ll trace how writers such as Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, China Mieville, Adania Shibli, and Valeria Luiselli,  navigate the complex boundaries between aesthetics and politics; representation and documentation; and realism and experimental form. [4]

ENGL 8351 Studies in 20th & 21st Century American Literatures: 21st Century American Climate Fiction

Teresa Goddu - Online Synchronous

M 12:10 - 3:00 PM

Climate fiction is a rapidly emerging genre within contemporary literature that addresses urgent environmental, social, psychological, political, affective, and ethical issues stemming from climate change through an imaginative lens. Named as “cli-fi” by the blogger Dan Bloom in 2008 and transformed into a cultural buzzword by the popular press, climate fiction has become over the last decade a focus of literary production, readerly interest, scholarly criticism, and academic teaching.

This course surveys contemporary American fiction that addresses the climate crisis. We will address two large questions: 1) how the climate crisis is provoking a new literature genre and 2) how fiction in turn shapes understandings of and responses to this crisis. Hence, we will focus on questions of genre (how new genres coalesce, especially within new media environments), motifs and methods (both thematic and formal), and literature’s value to the climate conversation. In short: how is climate fiction defined? what does it say? and why does it matter? 

Texts may include: Ben Lerner, 10:04; Cormac McCarthy, The Road; Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles; Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation; Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones; Lauren Groff, Florida; and others, including short stories, films, and critical works. Students will participate in weekly short exercises as we build our own sense of the genre (book reviews, motif library, etc.) and write a final seminar paper. Students will also have the opportunity to choose our final readings for the course. [4]

ENGL 8370 Studies in 18th Century British Literature: Radical Feelings: 1750 - 1850

Scott Juengel - Online Synchronous

W 12:10 - 3:00 PM

“The passions are what we could call monarchical states of being,” writes Philip Fisher in The Vehement Passions (2002), “Impassioned states seem to drive out every other form of attention or state of being.”  This seminar might be characterized as a short history of strong feeling (before, during, and after the revolutionary decades).  By focusing on a period defined by what James Chandler calls “hot chronologies”—a historical sense of accelerating eventfulness and periodizing condensation—we will explore the connections between political sentiment and (in)operative feeling in an age of world historical upheaval.  Beginning in the mid eighteenth century with the cult of sensibility and its pedagogies of exquisite feeling, the syllabus will reconsider how the subsequent history of revolution, reaction, emancipation, and rights discourse produced new modes of thinking about impassioned states and mass affect.  What new subjectivities can be felt in times of social unrest and governmental suppression?  Which emotions bind one to social collectivities, and which compel withdrawal?  How are outsized passions—e.g. terror, rage, guilt, shame, ecstasy, enthusiasm—at odds with moral sentiment and bourgeois propriety, and how might they translate into political action?  While the seminar will be transatlantic in its geopolitical coordinates and thus quickened by revolutionary campaigns and freedom movements in the U.S., France, and Haiti, the bulk of the primary materials will be British and American.  Primary texts might include selections from Hume, Adam Smith, Sterne, Sancho, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Blake, Godwin, Hays, Radcliffe, Sansay, Baillie, Sedgwick, Wedderburn and others, likely ending with Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. [4]

ENGL 8410 Studies in Romantic & Victorian Literature: Science and Science Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Jay Clayton - Online Synchronous

T 12:10 - 3:00 PM

This course focuses on British and transatlantic writing during two moments in which both genre distinctions and disciplinary boundaries between science and literature were being recast in decisive ways—one in the decades just prior to the Victorian age, when science and technology were very much a part of the larger culture, not a separate sphere reserved for specialists; the other at the fin de siècle, when “racial science,” eugenics, and imperialism were closely intertwined. In each period, we will read foundational works of scientific culture alongside British and American popular fiction, which powerfully shaped public attitudes toward science and society. We will also read some neo-Victorian fiction from the late-twentieth century to explore how alternative history can revise our understanding of the past.

The course begins by contrasting two iconic works of SF and realism published in the same year—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818)—then turns to the 1830s, the crucible in which scientific disciplines were being forged, to read fantastic exploration narratives: Poe’s “Ms. Found in a Bottle” (1833) and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1839).

We then fast-forward to the second half of the century when disciplinarity was more securely established and mass market fiction was similarly being cordoned off from serious literature, developments that I argue are closely related. Texts will be drawn from utopias such as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890); SF and horror stories such as Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); H. Ryder Haggard’s imperial romance, She (1887) and Pauline Hopkins’s inversion of colonial romance, Of One Blood (1903); two early examples of black science fiction, Martin Delany’s Blake; or The Huts of America (1859-62) and M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901); and early SF from India, Jagadish Chandra Bose’s “Runaway Cyclone” (1896) and Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905). Neo-Victorian fiction will include Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), stories by Andrea Barrett and A.S. Byatt, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016). [4]

ENGL 8110 Proseminar

Candice Amich

R 12:00  – 3:00 PM

The proseminar provides an introduction to English graduate studies through attention to both
practical and theoretical issues. We will preview the arc of progress through the PhD program,
from the art of the seminar paper to developing a dissertation project. Special attention will be
paid to developing the writing skills necessary for professional success; we will draft and
exchange conference abstracts, conference papers, and book reviews. We will also examine
the stages through which an essay, that begins as a conference or seminar paper, may move
toward publication. Together we will read a host of theoretical and critical essays that cover
established and emerging approaches across historical periods, geographic areas, and
genres.

ENGL 8138 Critical Theory: Race and (Dis)Possession

Alex Dubilet & Ben Tran 

W 3:10 – 6:00 PM

How do we theorize the relation between race and the operations of possession and
dispossession in modernity? What is the role and significance of capitalism and modern regimes
of property to the processes of racialization? What theoretical tools are necessary for
understanding the nexus and legacy of possession and dispossession that emerge from the
discovery of the New World and subsequent settler colonialism? How do we think of possession
and dispossession in slavery and its afterlives? This graduate seminar will explore these and related
questions from multiple theoretical angles and through various historical and geographic sites. By
engaging with diverse scholarship across Marxism, critical theory, literary studies, black studies,
and settler colonial critique, this seminar will introduce students to some of the most significant
concepts of modern theoretical discourse, useful for research across different time periods,
genres, and subdisciplines.

Possible authors will include (in part, with the input of the participants): Karl Marx,
W.E.B. Dubois, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Sylvia Wynter, Cheryl Harris,
Moishe Postone, Patrick Wolfe, Silvia Federici, Saidiya Hartman, Glen Coulthard, Brenna
Bhandar, Frank B. Wilderson III, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. In exploring such topics as
primitive accumulation, the struggle for the commons, colonial modernity and decolonial
imaginaries, and the realities of and resistances to slavery and its afterlife, the seminar will explore
key theoretical perspectives in the critical humanities, unpack the concepts entailed by them, and
trace the requisite historical frameworks informing them. Throughout, we will ask after the
different ways race has been theorized in relation to and in ambit of liberal capitalist modernity.

ENGL 8351 Studies in 20th & 21st Century American Literatures: Diaspora, Poetics, and Empire

Anthony Reed

M 3:10 – 6:00 PM

Focusing on key texts of the twentieth century, and emphasizing the contemporary, this course will track black responses to empire, its dissolution, and the limits of sovereignty alongside shifting understandings of race. Abiding questions include the relationship of literature to its context, alongside the interrelated temporal contours of literary form and the rhetoric of progress in literary and theoretical texts.

We’ll consider Négritude, 20th century pan-Africanisms, and various configurations of black nationalism and internationalism. I’ll arrange it so that it provides good field coverage, and lets me get a rolling start to my next project.

Students are required to take this course during their first term in the Ph.D. program.

Students are required to take this course during the fall term of their third year in the Ph.D. Program. Learning-intensive workshop where students design and plan the courses they will teach in subsequent semesters. Students will be introduced to a learning-centered, student-oriented approach to teaching, a revision-based approach to writing instruction, and a holistic strategy for course design.

May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic.

Topics include gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, visuality and/or spectrality, postcolonial studies, disability studies, archival research and editorial practices, digital and public humanities, and environmental humanities. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic.

Previous Topics:

• F2012: Shakespeare & Theory (Lynn Enterline)
• F2013: Things (Jonathan Lamb)
• F2016: Narrative/Theory (Kathryn Schwarz)
• S2018: Postcolonial Theory (Ben Tran)
• S2019: Capitalism & Racialization (Alex Dubilet & Ben Tran)
• F2020: Race and (Dis)Possession (Alex Dubilet & Ben Tran)
• S2021: Literature in Dark Times (Allison Schachter)

May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic.

History and development of queer theory. Key intellectual antecedents, significant theorists, and current trends. How sexuality intersects with gender, race, class, nationality, ability, and religion.

Topics include modernisms, African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and Caribbean American literatures. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic.

Previous Topics:

• F2017: Renaissance Lyric (Jessie Hock)
• S2019: Subject to Sexuality in the Early Modern Period (Lynn Enterline)
• F2019: Firing the Canon (Jessie Hock)
• F2022: What is Lyric (Jessie Hock)

Topics include modernisms, African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and Caribbean American literatures. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic.

Previous Topics:

• F2010: James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, & Langston Hughes (Vera Kutzinski)
• S2011: The Troika Plus One (Hortense Spillers)
• S2012: Subjectivity & Suppression in African American and Caribbean Autobiography (Ifeoma Nwankwo)
• F2013: American Classics & their Afterlives (Cecelia Tichi)
• F2016: Performance & Precarity in the Neoliberal Americas (Candice Amich)
• F2016: African American Poetry & Poetics, 1950s to the Present (Vera Kutzinski)
• S2018: The Idea of Black Cultures (Hortense Spillers)
• S2018: 20th Century American Political Fictions (Cecelia Tichi)
• S2019: African American Poetry (Vera Kutzinski)
• F2019: Narratives of Black Love & Kinship (Emily Lordi)
• S2020: Diaspora, Poetics, & Empire (Anthony Reed)
• S2021: 21st Century American Climate Fiction (Teresa Goddu)
   

May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic.

Previous Topics:

• F2015: The Enlightenment & Its Literary Connections (Scott Juengel)
• F2015: Fiction & Fictionality (Jonathan Lamb)
• F2017: Experiments in Narrative in the Long 18th Century (Jonathan Lamb)
• S2018: Performing Persons & Places in the Long 18th Century (Bridget Orr)
• F2018: Satire, Roman, Novel 1600-1800 (Jonathan Lamb)
• F2019: The Book of Worlds (Scott Juengel)
• S2021: Radical Feelings 1750 - 1850 (Scott Juengel)

May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic.

Previous Topics:

• S2014: Law, Narrative & Romantic Literature (Mark Schoenfield)
• S2017: Race, Embodiment, and the Victorian Imagination (Rachel Teukolsky)
• F2017: Science Fiction in 19th Century Literature (Jay Clayton)
• F2018: Law, Theatricality & Romantic Literature (Mark Schoenfield)
• S2020: New Approaches to 19th-Century Studies (Rachel Teukolsky)
• S2021: Science and Science Fiction in 19th Century Literature (Jay Clayton)

Topics include British and Anglo-Irish modernisms, Black British writers.  May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic.

Previous Topics:

• S2015: Framing Modernism in the 20th & 21st Centuries (Mark Wollaeger)

Topics include classical or ancient legacies; hemispheric American literatures, Caribbean literatures in different languages; translation studies; studies of literary genres and forms; global modernisms; transatlantic and transpacific studies.  May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic.

Previous Topics:

• F2014: Caribbean Fiction & Poetry (Vera Kutzinski)
• S2016: Secularism & Minority Culture (Allison Schachter)
• S2016: Colonial Modernity (Ben Tran)
• S2017: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines (Marzia Milazzo)
• F2017: Idioms of Servility (Colin Dayan)
• F2018: Theories of the Vernacular (Akshya Saxena)

Topics in global colonial and global postcolonial Anglophone literatures, including Asian, African, and Caribbean writers; global modernisms. May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic.

Previous Topics:

• S2013: Atlantic & Hemispheric Studies (Vera Kutzinski)
• F2021: The Long Poem (Colin Dayan)
• S2022: Literature Across Media (Akshya Saxena)

Topics include new models of science and the humanities; modes of reality and representation in the age of cyberculture; American literature and the cinema; early cinema (1893-1920). May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic.

Previous Topics:

• F2011: The Distracted Subject of Cinema (Jennifer Fay)
• S2015: Technoscience to Nanoculture (Jay Clayton)
• S2015: Modes of Reality & Representation in the Age of Cyberculture (Helen Shin)
• F2016: On Sincerity & the Media of Appearance (Jennifer Fay)
• S2019: Media Studies (Helen Shin)
• F2019: Archives & End Times (Jennifer Fay)
• S2022: Cinema and the Problem of Work (Jennifer Fay & Iggy Cortez)

May be repeated for credit more than once if there is no duplication in topic.

Previous Topics:

• S2012: Herman Melville (Colin Dayan)
• S2014: Early African American Print Culture (Teresa Goddu)
• F2014: The Long Poem (Colin Dayan)
• F2018: Rituals of Belief & Practices of Law in the Americas (Colin Dayan)